Methane Leaks

   Issue Briefing  

Clear Ask to Policymakers: Public Utility Commissions should require utility companies to locate and eliminate methane leaks, prioritizing repairs and retirement over costly pipeline replacement.

Hot, toxic, expensive–methane leaks must be stopped.

Methane is a climate disaster hiding in plain sight. Leaks from natural gas pipelines release methane—an invisible, explosive, super-potent greenhouse gas —at volumes 3.5 - 8x greater than previous EPA estimates.  Here’s the kicker: It’s probably happening in your neighborhood. Across the U.S., more than 600,000 active leaks spew methane directly into homes, businesses, and neighborhood streets. With this much leakage, natural gas is worse for the climate than coal.

Utility companies are making the problem worse. Instead of quickly patching leaks or retiring the pipeline and transitioning customers to electricity, utility companies are 1) letting leaks gush methane for months — or even years or 2) replacing entire pipelines, locking in fossil fuel use, and passing the costs along to customers. 

Enter: The Public Utility Commission

Every state has a Public Utility Commission (PUC) that oversees utility companies, though it might  go by a different name in your state, like Public Service Commission. These small, highly technical teams are economic regulators that exist to protect the public interest.

PUCs are tasked with making sure utility companies:

  • Charge fair prices (or “rates”)

  • Offer safe and reliable service

  • And make smart long-term investments

In some states, a final priority is ensuring utility companies are on track to meet climate goals. However, it’s rarely the top priority, and most PUCs don’t have this authority at all. Economic and safety arguments are most persuasive. Jump to the glossary section below to learn more.

Since utility companies are not acting in the public interest when it comes to methane leaks, PUCs are well within their authority to step in and issue regulations. They have a long list of tools at their disposal (think: incentives, standards, requirements…). They should use any and all of them to require utility companies to find and stop methane leaks, prioritizing repairs and retirement over costly pipeline replacement. 

While a handful of PUCs have begun to implement some of these solutions, their proceedings are opaque and they haven’t delivered results: methane is still leaking at virtually unknown levels across the country, while utility companies scope out expensive, unnecessary replacement projects.

💡 As concerned members of the public, our job is to urge the PUCs to deliver results. We don’t need to get too deep in the weeds—it’s the commissioners’ jobs to propose the best technical solutions—we just need to contact them!

Jump to the solutions section below to learn more.

STOP! You know enough to take meaningful action.

Curious and want to learn more? Cool, scroll on!

Methane leaks everywhere, including in your neighborhood.

Below is a crowd-sourced list of mapped methane leaks across the country. Click here to submit a new map.

A couple of things to keep in mind:

  • When looking at a utility company’s map, consider it the lower limit for the true amount of leakage. A recent study shows they only catch 35% of leaks identified by newer technology, like the kind used by non-profit groups working to hold utilities accountable. 

  • Some maps have disclaimers saying serious leaks are acted on so promptly that they don’t make it onto the map in the first place. That may sound good, but remember: it means the leaks that are on the map may have been left to gush for months or even years, as utility companies merely “keep an eye on them,” because they’re “not sufficiently hazardous” to warrant action.  

See the methane leaks in your city:

  • Use your preferred search tool to look up  “methane leaks near me” or “[utility name] + natural gas leak map.“. You might also find local news articles about recent high-profile leaks, evacuations, or explosions. We need both data and stories to be effective advocates.

    Click here to submit a leak map to the crowd-sourced list!

False solution: Replacing pipelines.

Over the last 10-15 years, many utility companies have opted for replacing leaky and leak-prone pipelines. While it sounds proactive and responsible, it’s not necessary. Advanced repair technologies are just as safe and don't lock in new fossil fuel infrastructure at a time we should be transitioning away from it.

Here’s the kicker: Climate crisis aside, these pipeline replacement programs are impossibly expensive. Already today, U.S. gas utility companies are already spending tens of billions of dollars annually to replace their gas pipelines (see chart).

In Idaho, Oregon, and Washington, replacement will cost $1.3 billion. It will cost $8 billion in Philadelphia, $8-12 billion in Washington, D.C, and a whopping $42 billion in the state of Massachusetts.

Utility companies are hurtling down the financially irresponsible path of spending $1.4 trillion on new gas infrastructure by 2050. Decarbonization aside, this level of spending will lead to untenable rate increases for consumers and, consequently, stranded asset risk for utility companies, who soon may not serve enough customers to fully pay off the new infrastructure. While selective replacement will likely be necessary to ensure public safety, these plans are far from it.

Real Solutions: Detect, repair, and retire.

Public Utility Commissions need to step in. They can require utility companies to detect and eliminate methane leaks — but they key: prioritizing repairs and retirement over costly pipeline replacement. 

Dig deeper on the real solution levers:

  • Right now, utilities overwhelmingly rely on customers to identify leaks. For example, from 2018 to 2020 in Massachusetts, 78% of the leaks from the biggest gas utility company were identified by customers calling and saying “hey, I think I smell gas.” The rest were identified by walking inspections that only happen every 1-3 years, where utility surveyors stuck hand-sensors into manholes and basement gas meters.

    Instead, utility companies should be using Advanced Leak Detection technologies. There are far more sensitive, accurate instruments than the old hand-sensors, like “cavity ring-down spectroscopy (CDRS). CDRS devices can be mounted on cars, backpacks, or existing weather-detection infrastructure, and they gather a ton of data that can be turned into an emissions heat-map. In fact, in one study, utility surveys using old technology identified only 35% of the leaks identified with CDRS. This technology is cost-effective and would allow utility companies to intelligently prioritize their repair efforts. 

    A bipartisan piece of legislation called the  PIPES Act of 2020 is supposed to require all gas utility companies to create “Advanced Leak Detection Programs” that lay out their plans for acquiring and deploying advanced technologies. However, its future is highly uncertain, making t Advanced Leak Detection a no-brainer area where PUCs can step up and fill the gap.

  • While replacing entire pipelines may be necessary in certain cases, patching active methane leaks and proactively repairing leak-prone pipes offer serious cost-savings and are, in many cases, equally effective. 

    To repair a methane leak, utility maintenance teams apply epoxy or tape to a leaking section, reinforce joints between sections, or do “cathodic protection” – using electricity to prevent corrosion. These are tried and true technologies that can be done even more efficiently with new “keyholing tools,” which make small, precise openings in sidewalks and streets, instead of the big trenches that are typically dug. 

    There are also exciting new Advanced Repair Technologies that allow utility companies to proactively repair leak-prone sections of pipe – sometimes upwards of 50 years, obviating the need to replace them at all. There are robots called CISBOTs that line the inside of pipes and inject sealants into joints. There is plastic sleeving and a new “cured-in-place (CIP)” composite material that can line the inside of a metal pipe – effectively insulating it from the inside. 

    What’s most important – whether using the advanced repair technologies or the tried and true – is that PUCs change the regulatory environment so that utility companies are incentivized or required to prioritize repairs over replacement. 

    One powerful way to do this is for PUCs to reject utility rate cases that propose willy-nilly pipeline replacement. Rate cases are when utility companies ask the PUC for permission to raise rates – aka charge customers more – to cover their new expenses. PUCs can approve, alter, or reject the rate case, depending if they deem the new rate to be “just and reasonable.” In 2023, the Illinois PUC altered the rate case for the utility company Peoples Gas on the basis that its pipeline replacement program was too expensive and wasn’t necessary for system safety.

    Another example is Massachusetts DPU’s new program to encourage the adoption of advanced leak repair technology. They give utility companies a guaranteed rate of return (aka profit) for doing proactive advanced leak repairs. The idea is to put the incentives for repair and replacement on equal footing – but only two of the six utility companies in MA plan to use it, and one is only using it for pipelines not already slated for replacement. Sigh.

  • The real solution: Retire the natural gas pipelines, and electrify instead.

    Wherever possible, we should be taking natural gas pipelines out of service all together, or ‘retiring’ them, in utility-parlance. 

    This is in line with climate science – and your state’s climate goals, if relevant! – and will help get utilities off the dangerous path of spending $1.4 trillion on new gas infrastructure by 2050. That level of spending will lead to unsustainable rate increases for consumers and, consequently, stranded asset risk for utility companies, who soon may not serve enough customers to fully pay off the new infrastructure.  

    One way to nudge utility companies is to require them to at least consider the alternatives  each time they want to replace a pipeline. PUCs could require utility companies to conduct a “non-pipeline alternative” (NPA) study, as is now required in Massachusetts, or a cost-benefit analysis of repair vs. replace vs. retire before approving any request to replace a pipeline. 

    Ultimately, retirement requires switching customers to electricity, which requires coordination between gas utilities, electric utilities, and home-owners, who need to update some key appliances to run on electricity instead of gas – think heat pumps, electric water heaters, and induction stoves. Retirement plus electrification is great for decarbonization, health, and safety, but it doesn’t happen spontaneously. It requires advance planning, coordination, and a thorough cost-benefit analysis. 

    Eleven states and D.C. have opened this Pandora’s box with some “future-of-gas” planning: California, Colorado, District of Columbia, Illinois, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Nevada, New Jersey, New York, Oregon, Rhode Island, and Washington. However, effective retirement planning takes time, and like most regulators, PUCs move slowly and deliberately. This means that even these “leading” states are still in the exploratory phases of retirement.

    For example, in California, the CPUC is selecting the criteria they will use to identify lines for retirement. They’re weighing considerations like cost savings to the utility, leak risk of the pipes, environmental justice burdens in the community, and more. In Oregon and Washington, the PUCs have required the utility companies to study what it would look like to retire their new GTN Xpress pipeline early, since natural gas demand in the region has decreased in the several years since it was built. 

    We need more states to join the list, and in the states with “future-of-gas” planning underway, PUCs need to know customers and ratepayers support this initiative and want to see change.

Top Talking Points

Different decision-makers have different priorities. Choose the framing that you think will resonate best with your policymaker. Learn more about meeting your rep where they’re here.

The thing about methane leaks is they…

💰 …cost consumers money.

  • Every month, utility companies directly pass on to customers some or all of the cost of leaked methane , as a line item on our bills.

  • They also pass along the cost of (often unnecessary) pipeline replacements to customers in the form of rate increases. 

  • Since consumers pay the “commodity price” of the gas we consume, we are directly exposed to the volatility of the international gas market.

✊ …have disproportionate impacts. 

  • Low-income and communities of color are more likely to live around aging, leaking natural gas infrastructure or gas power plants, meaning they are disproportionately exposed to the associated health and safety risks. 

  • People with low incomes already pay a higher proportion of their income on energy, so they are disproportionately affected by energy price increases.

📉 …can tarnish a utility’s public image. 

  • No utility company wants  to draw repeated scrutiny for unreasonable rates and public safety scandals. For example, California’s Pacific Gas & Electric is the target of ever-increasing public ire amid increasing rates, rolling blackouts, and its role in sparking deadly wildfires.

☄️ …pose serious safety risks. 

  • Methane explosions are deadly and expensive. From 2010 - 2021, there were 2,600 fires or explosions that killed 122 people and cost over $4 billion. 

  • There is a hazardous pipeline incident every 40 hours in the U.S.

♥️ …are harmful to human health. 

  • Natural gas leaks also contain hazardous air pollutants like benzene and volatile organic compounds, which can cause or exacerbate respiratory illness, cancer, diabetes, premature births, and more. 

🇺🇸 …would be a popular policy with voters. 

  • Recent non-partisan polling shows that “setting strict limits on methane emissions from oil and gas production” is supported by 74% of registered voters, including 64% of moderate Republicans.  . 

Why hasn’t anyone done anything?

Methane leaks are the responsibility of gas utility companies to find and address. But if they’re such an egregious safety, financial, and climate problem, how are they are still allowed to persist? 

  • For utility companies, one answer for their inaction is not surprising: profits.

    Replacing pipes is profitable, whereas repairing leaks is not profitable. Thanks to a Supreme Court Decision from 1935, utility companies are allowed to pass on the cost of leaked gas directly to consumers, which means utility companies do far less leak repair than they would if they had to bear the cost of the lost gas themselves. 

    In sharp contrast, utilities are legally guaranteed a “fixed rate of return” (profit) on their “capital expenditures,” which include pipeline replacement. TLDR; replacing pipelines is expensive but profitable, repairing pipelines is wildly cheaper but without any profit.

    Consider this real life example to see the math…

    Energy research economist Dr. Dorie Seavey lays out how utility company National Grid’s Boston division can guarantee$300,000 in profits by replacing a mile of pipeline rather than repairing it:

    • 🛠️ Leak Repair Cost: $4,742 per leak

    • 🛍️ Pipeline Replacement Cost: $3.4 million per mile

    • 🟰 A mile of pipeline with 4 leaks scenario:

      • Repairing leaks: Costs $18,968 (operations expense)  → No additional profit for the utility

      • Replacing pipeline: Costs $3.4 million (CapEx) earns an 8.9% rate of return → $300,000 in guaranteed profits over time

  • PUCs have a mandate to care. So why haven’t they acted more urgently? 

    • Interconnected networks… Commissioners and utility company employees attend the same conferences, have interconnected professional networks, and will often work at both the utilities and regulatory commissions at some point in their careers. This “revolving door” – plus the wonky nature of the industry – creates a highly technical and insular environment that is difficult to penetrate. 

    • PUCs are culturally conservative – as in:

      • Change is slow and hard, and even when given new tools or introduced new ideas. Since Public Utility Commissions are tasked with ensuring safety and reliability, they stick to what they know and what’s been done before.

      • PUCs are, with a few notable exceptions, underfunded and understaffed, particularly compared to the utility companies. Moreover, there’s an information asymmetry: utility companies monitor their infrastructure, have all the financial models, etc. PUCs only know what the utility companies report – and don’t have the resources to check their work – resulting in a culture of rubber stamping.

      • Finally, PUCs rarely hear from the public. They assume that people don’t know and don’t care about their proceedings, because very few people show up. In reality, it’s because very few people know about them! Given the dominance of utility experts, constituent advocates–that’s us!–bring a fresh perspective, ensuring that public interest and accountability remain central to their work. We are an invaluable addition to the conversation.

  • In the past few years, concern about the safety risks and costs of fugitive methane have elevated the issue to the concern of federal lawmakers in Congress. Two notable attempts at progress have either been repealed or are now on shaky ground. 

    The PIPES Act of 2020: Passed on a bipartisan basis and signed by President Donald Trump in 2020, the PIPES Act set stricter requirements for detecting and repairing leaks across the entire natural gas supply chain.

    • Notable provisions include: requiring gas utilities to check their pipelines every year (instead of every three years) and imposing deadlines for repairing leaks to 6 months or 2 years (instead of no deadline), depending on the severity of the leak. These requirements should be thought of as a floor:  essential to have in place, but not enough to make meaningful progress.

    • Once this bill was passed, it had to be “implemented” (aka turned into actionable regulations) by the Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration (aka PHMSA).. PHMSA finished the regulations just a few days before President Trump’s inauguration, but never officially published them, meaning they are at high risk of being repealed, watered down, or simply left in limbo. 

    The methane fee in the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA): While the IRA was mostly a suite of “carrots” for pro-climate behavior, it did include one notable “stick:” a fee that oil and gas companies would pay if their extraction and processing facilities were found to emit more than the allowed amount of methane. Unfortunately, Congress has already repealed the fee, which would have meaningfully reduced fugitive methane emissions at the top of the supply chain. 

    However! Even if these federal laws were still in effect, they still wouldn’t do enough to address the diffuse challenge of downstream fugitive methane from the distribution network. Remember, the methane leaks in cities and communities across the country like “death by a thousand cuts.” Since there are so many leaks spread across the country, it requires a widespread ambition and coordinated effort to get it under control.

Natural gas leaks so much that it’s worse than coal. 

Natural gas is far from natural—it’s a fossil fuel whose primary ingredient is methane (85-95%), an incredibly potent greenhouse gas that is 80x worse than CO2 and responsible for 20-30% of the planetary warming we see today. We can think of methane and CO2 like a pair of evil twins. Methane molecules warm the planet a lot over a short amount of time (7-12 years, to be precise), whereas CO2 molecules warm the planet a little bit over hundreds of years. 

Stopping leaks is a strategic priority: Cutting methane emissions now is the best way to immediately slow the rate of global warming, while we work to decarbonize the entire economy. Per Project Drawdown, addressing methane is our “emergency brakes” for climate.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) vastly underestimates the true amount of leakage, because it relies on small sample sizes and self-reporting from the oil and gas industry.

  • 💥 In 2018, the EPA estimated a 1.4% leakage rate

  • 💥 But independent studies found the true rate to be 2.3% (1.6x higher), 5x higher, and even up to 3.5-8x higher than the EPA’s most recent estimates.

  • 💥 That means between 2.3% and 11.2% of methane could be leaking before it ever reaches homes.

With so many methane leaks, “natural” gas is as bad—or worse—for the climate than coal. A 2012 Environmental Defense Fund (EDF) study found that if methane leaks exceed 3%, natural gas becomes equally as harmful as coal for planetary warming. A 2023 study from Harvard, Duke, and Brown Universities and the Rocky Mountain Institute found an even lower threshold: just 0.2% leakage makes natural gas worse than coal. We are far past that threshold.

Where is it leaking? Everywhere. 

Some of the most high-profile methane leaks occur at extraction sites, where oil and gas companies fail to detect, report, or fix leaks. These leaks, often in gas-producing regions like the Southwest, Appalachia, and even urban Los Angeles County, are so significant that the Environmental Defense Fund has launched a satellite (aptly named ‘MethaneSAT’) to track them from space.

But the most widespread and hard-to-address source of methane leaks is from the 2+ million miles of local distribution pipelines. These lines run under city streets and directly into homes, powering stoves, furnaces, water heaters, and dryers. Leaks in the distribution network is like “death by a thousand cuts.”

Find a map of natural gas leaks in your area.

How did we get here?
Well, America lovvves “natural” gas.

In the United States, we use a lot of natural gas. Nearly half of it is burned to generate electricity, and the rest is used directly for industrial applications, like powering manufacturing equipment, or to heat our homes and businesses. 

The share of “natural” gas in U.S. electricity generation has risen dramatically in the last X years. Today, it comprises around 42% of our electricity generation, up from only 18% in 2005. Starting in the aughts, natural gas quickly displaced coal as a key pillar of our energy system. New technology in the form of hydraulic fracturing and horizontal drilling (aka “fracking”) made it cheaper than coal, and it emits less CO2 than coal when burned. This magic combination of cheaper and ostensibly cleaner energy made natural gas the darling of both Presidents Bush and Obama.

Lost in the sauce?
Explainers & Glossary of Terms

Investor-Owned Monopolies – Most utility companies are what’s known as “Investor-Owned Utilities” or IOUs. These utility companies are privately owned, so they have a mandate to maximize shareholder value – aka be profitable. They also have a monopoly in their geographic service area. While the monopoly is practical (imagine the chaos and inefficiency of a dozen companies simultaneously trying to operate their natural gas systems), it also means utility companies need to be regulated to ensure they don’t abuse it.

PUCs – And that’s why we have Public Utility Commissions. Most PUCs have 5 commissioners, who are either appointed by the governor or elected by the public. These commissioners are the most powerful energy regulators that you’ve probably never heard of. 

Regulatory scope – Their regulatory scope covers electric and gas utilities, and in some states, water and/or telecommunications utilities. When it comes to regulating fugitive methane, all PUCs have authority over the distribution pipelines, since they regulate the gas utilities that own these pipelines. Many PUCs also have some authority over transmission and gathering pipelines, but the scope and extent varies by state.

PUCs have a full suite of regulatory tools at their disposal, including the following common ones that you may hear get tossed around:

  • Rate Cases: When the PUC approves or denies a utility company’s request to raise their customer’s bills, or “rates.” Because of the CapEx Bias, utilities often propose rate increases to pay for new infrastructure – including unnecessarily pipeline replacements. But the PUC gets to judge whether the new rates are “just and reasonable” – which is where we have influence. You don’t have to be an expert to say you don’t want your bills to skyrocket. 

  • Integrated Resource Planning (IRP): The strategic planning meeting between PUCs and utility company. The IRP maps out the utility’s plans to meet future energy demand in a cost-effective, safe way. At worst, the IRP process is just the PUC rubber-stamping a utility's plan to build, build, build to maximize their profits. At best, it’s a chance for the PUC to critically inspect the utility’s practices and set them on the right course. 

  • Rulemakings: Ad-hoc proceedings where Public Utility Commissions make or update regulations for various aspects of utility operations. It’s a catch-all process where advocates can push for rules that prioritize affordability and safety.

Methane movie time!

Let’s be honest; we all loved the substitute teacher who just *put on a movie* instead of that long division worksheet. Be your own substitute teacher today! Sit back, relax, and have a laugh. The Climate Town team will bring you up to speed.

Watch this: Natural Gas Is Scamming America | Climate Town

** Disclaimer: This video focuses on the rise of natural gas and the problem of fugitive methane… in general. It does not include much on the solution: asking PUCs to tamp down on leaks. You’ll have to read this Issue Briefing to learn that! Specifically, this section.

You made it to the end and are more than equipped to take action!